SOURCE: "Democracy and Homosexuality," in The New Republic, Vol. 209, No. 25, December 20, 1993, pp. 17-35.

Berman is an American educator, historian, and critic. In the following excerpt, he praises Shilts's presentation of evidence in Conduct Unbecoming, but suggests that some of the facts and anecdotes are repetitious and perhaps exaggerated.

Randy Shilts's study …, Conduct Unbecoming: Gays & Lesbians in the U.S. Military, conforms to the same inspiration for history-by-interview and collective biography that you see in Martin Duberman's book Stonewall, 1993 and in some other histories of the gay movement—though Shilts goes at these interviews in a spirit of popular journalism, without any suggestion that he has pondered his links to the school of history from below or the international '68 style. Mostly the book is a heroic feat of documentation. Shilts has conducted 1,100 interviews, and he has worked these interviews up into 700 pages of stories and anecdotes, with each...